Power Pivot / Power Query Read-Only Connection Problems In Excel 2013 – And What To Do About Them

Anyone who has tried to do any serious work with Power Pivot and Power Query will know about this problem: you use Power Query to load some tables into the Data Model in Excel 2013; you make some changes in the Power Pivot window; you then go back to Power Query, make some changes there and you get the dreaded error

We couldn’t refresh the table ‘xyz’ from the connection ‘Power Query – xyz’. Here’s the error message we got:

COM Error: Microsoft.Mashup.OleDbProvider; The query ‘xyz’ or one of its inputs was modified in Power Query after this connection was added. Please disable and re-enable loading to the Data Model for this query..

This post has a solution for the same problem in Excel 2010, but it doesn’t work for Excel 2013 unfortunately. There is a lot of helpful information out there on the web about this issue if you…